by Diane Duane
One of these was a large foreign merchant bank called Regners Wilhelm, a German-based firm, outwardly very respectable. One was a chemical supply firm called Haller Chemical. And yet another—and this one Venom found a matter for some concern—was the United States Government. CCRC seemed to be supplying something—the details were presently fuzzy—to Kennedy Space Center.
All of this gave Eddie Brock a lot to think about. He was disturbed by the government connection. He was even more disturbed by the presence of any CCRC operation in Florida. The great aquifer which underlay the state was one of its greatest assets, and was tremendously vulnerable. Already the water system there had been much damaged by the thoughtless misuse of the past century. And the flatness of the state made that aquifer very susceptible to contamination: such contamination would take months, maybe years, to purge itself completely from the ecosystem, doing who knew what damage both to animal life and the humans living there—the innocents who had no other source of water, and would shortly find themselves being poisoned if radioactive by-products were to be stored as carelessly in Florida as they had been in Manhattan.
Until a day or so ago, Eddie Brock had been content to turn all these things over in his mind, and plan, trying to figure out what was the best way in which to proceed. But then a piece of news had been brought to him that gave him much more concern.
The Lizard had been seen in Florida. All around him, Eddie could feel the symbiote twitching against his skin in the beginnings of rage. The Lizard was a thoughtless, mindless monster, one that needed to be killed: it had done enough harm to the innocent in its own time. Occasionally Spider-Man had served to contain the thing. But now, to this already dangerous cocktail of CCRC carelessness and involvement in Florida, the Lizard had been added.
Venom knew that the Lizard had been used in the past by another super villain, a woman named Calypso. At least Hobgoblin, who would love such a tool, was safely out of the picture, and put away in the Vault for the moment. But there were others who were free, and wouldn’t scruple. And Curt Connors, the Lizard’s human alter ego, was a scientist, one with expertise in biochemistry—but chemistry first and foremost.
It all made Venom slightly suspicious. Eddie Brock was a journalist before Spider-Man conspired to ruin his good name. And now those old instincts kicked in: he smelled something, something suspicious. Something that needed his attention in Florida.
In addition, if the Lizard was in Florida, it wouldn’t be surprising if Spider-Man showed up. Venom couldn’t bring himself to object to that.
Eddie smiled a little, to himself and his other, put the paperwork back in its neat pile, and stood up.
Florida is supposed to be very nice this time of year, he thought. It’s time for us to go.
* * *
PETER met Vreni for breakfast. She looked at him with some concern. “Had a bad night?” she said. “You’ve got big circles under your eyes.”
Peter nodded. “A late one.”
“Will you be all right for today?”
“Sure, as soon as I get some coffee in me.”
“All right. I’ve made a couple of appointments for us down in Ochopee—and a couple in the spot where the Lizard was actually seen last night. We’re in good shape; we’ll have fresh reports. I’ll drive today, if you like—”
“No, it’s okay,” Peter said hastily, “I still have some work to do with the Questar—can we do it in two cars?”
“No problem.”
After breakfast, they retraced the route that Peter had taken the night before. About an hour or so later, they were parking in front of Saunders’s store, which Peter had passed while going after the Lizard. Vreni interviewed Mr. Saunders—”You just call me Dave now, honey”—a dear old, unreconstructed “old boy” with a halo of thin white hair, who either had never heard about women’s liberation or didn’t care about it. He repeatedly called Vreni “honey chile,” and although Peter saw her eyebrows go up the first time, plainly she wasn’t going to make an issue of it as long as the information kept coming.
“That big green thing came right in here,” he said, waving his arms around at the front door, now hanging pitifully off its hinges. “Went smashing around, broke half the glass in the place—” Mr. Saunders gestured helplessly at the windows. “Gonna take me days to get all this fixed. Have to go all the way down to Ochopee for it.” He glowered.
“Did he take anything specific that you could see?” Vreni said.
“Nope. Just banged around like a bull in a china shop.” Mr. Saunders looked unhappily around his shelves, some of which had indeed had china on them. Now it was all swept together in a jagged pile in the corner. “There’s most of my stock gone. Don’t know if my insurance is gonna cover it.”
“Well, certainly,” Vreni murmured, “you would think…”
“Honey chile,” said Mr. Saunders, turning a sharp-eyed blue gaze on her, “if you know an insurance company that routinely has clauses in its policies about damage by super villains, you let me know, okay? ’Cause I think I’m gonna have to change my coverage.”
Vreni swallowed and nodded.
“He came in here, plunged around, bashed things—it was kinda funny,” Saunders said, “in a horrible way. He’d bash something, and then stand still, and turn all stiff-like, and look around. Then bash something else. Then stop still again. He did that three or four times.”
Peter, taking pictures of the wreckage, was bemused by that. Doesn’t match his normal behavior at all—if anything the Lizard does could be considered normal.…
“I didn’t see if it took anything. I got down under the counter. So would you,” Mr. Saunders said. “He was roaring. Those teeth of his—” He shook his head. “Then out he went again, out the window, crash!” He pointed with his chin. “Ran out in the wet prairie. Don’t know what happened to him after that. Heard him roaring and yelling, but I wasn’t gonna go out and see about it. I gave him both barrels when he came in—didn’t bother him no more than spitballs would’ve.”
Peter took a few shots of Mr. Saunders while he talked to Vreni. “Have there been any strangers in the area the last few days?” Vreni said. “Anybody you wouldn’t recognize?”
Mr. Saunders shook his head. “Nope. That’s half the problem with this place. No one stops. Even the gas station—” He gestured at the pumps outside. “I can’t get a good price for gas out here. We’re too far from the distributor. Everybody who drives up here tanks up down in Ochopee or over in Naples, places like that. They don’t want to pay five cents more a gallon.… and why should they? Naah, we had three people stop for gas in the past two days, and they went straight on away again.”
“And no one’s stopped for longer than that—say, to sight-see?”
Saunders laughed. “Missy, anybody came hanging around here, the whole town, all four houses of it, would turn out to see. No one comes here to hang around. There’s nothing here. And tell you the truth, we don’t really want folks from outside hanging around here, either. This isn’t no city. It’s a town, our town—we like it private. We like it quiet. No crime, no one bothers us… until now.” He frowned at Vreni in a way that suggested to Peter that Mr. Saunders considered them both a sign of the decadence and imminent downfall of civilization.
“Well, we won’t be troubling you much longer, Mr. Saunders,” Vreni said. “But thank you for your help.” She turned to Peter. “You about ready?” she said.
“Yup. Let’s go.”
They made two other stops that day: another in Deep Lake, and then a third in Ochopee. The Deep Lake one was to Mrs. Bridger, a little old lady who lived in one of the houses built off the service road near Saunders’s. The Ochopee stop was with the Melendez family, a young couple and their two baby girls who farmed about five miles from Ochopee proper.
Mrs. Bridger sat on the porch of her tumbledown little house—which would have been new in the 1950s, but hadn’t been maintained or repaired since in the wake of who knew how many hurricanes—a
nd told how she had seen the Lizard swimming down the canal, three nights before. “You’re sure it wasn’t a ’gator?” Vreni said, as Peter roamed around taking pictures.
The old lady, half blind as she was, knew what Vreni was actually asking. “Oh no, dear,” she said. “The alligators were swimming away from him just as fast as they could. They no fools.” She chuckled. “He would stop every now and then, and then go on again. But he didn’t make no noise, or do anything bad.”
The canal ran close to Saunders’s. Casing the joint? Peter thought to himself. I wonder.…
A little later, Mike and Carol Melendez took Vreni and Peter out in the back of their little farmhouse and gestured away across the fields to indicate where the Lizard had cut across their bottom thirty, frightening their cattle, until, as Carol said indignantly, “A couple of them won’t even give milk now, they were so upset.” Peter took pictures of everything—those dead flat, beautifully green sorghum fields that the Melendezes were farming looked bizarre compared to the wild variation of the rest of the landscape around the Ochopee area. Mostly, though, as at Mrs. Bridger’s, he concentrated on their faces—the proud, private look of them, all profoundly distrustful, Peter thought, especially of strangers. There’s no way, he thought as he snapped away, that the one-armed Curt Connors could ever hide here. He’d stick out like a sore thumb. All these people had such a reserve, a resistance to strangers, that if someone new were around, Peter felt sure they would talk about it immediately.
There was something else that Peter started to notice as they talked to the Melendezes: they were afraid. He thought about it more, as he drove back toward Miami (more or less behind Vreni, who was zooming along ahead of him and apparently practicing for Le Mans). He got a sense that normally they wouldn’t happily have told him and Vreni even the little they did, but they were frightened at this intrusion into their life of something so completely beyond its boundaries. Maybe they were slightly flattered that a big-city reporter and a photographer came out all this way to see them. But there was more to it, Peter thought. His gut feeling said that they possibly had seen more than just the Lizard, or more often than just this once. The stress had simply become too much for them, severe enough to make them want to risk their privacy. But he couldn’t get rid of the feeling that there was more these people could have said, and they just weren’t saying it.
Once, while the Melendez husband had been talking to Vreni, Peter saw his wife look over northwards, past their fields, into the depths of Big Cypress. The look on her face was, for that moment, one of naked fear. But when she turned back to Vreni and her husband again, the expression was gone.
Peter thought of the expression on Buckingham’s face at NASA the other day, and filed the two expressions away together, for reconsideration later.
He and Vreni stopped at a diner by the Everglades Parkway for a late lunch, and didn’t discuss much of the interview material there, for they were both aware of the locals watching them closely, of ears stretched in their direction. As they were walking out to the cars, though, Vreni said to Peter, “I don’t know, but I get a feeling these people are withholding something.”
Peter nodded. “I don’t know what else we could say to get them to be more forthcoming, though. They all seem so private—”
Vreni sighed as she went to stand by her car. “Well, I’m going to keep nosing around. I’m still trying to get that police connection sorted out. Not much I can do on a Sunday, though. Tomorrow may be better. You want to do some more camera work today?”
“I think so,” Peter said.
“Well, see if you can be back this evening around sevenish. I want to touch base with you then, and we can talk about this material a little more after I’ve had time to transcribe the tapes and think everything over. Then tomorrow we’ll start some serious digging. Particularly, I want to pull some companies’ registers from Okechobee and Seminole counties, and see what kind of industry is working down here besides tourism.”
“No problem,” Peter said. “Sevenish it is.”
She sighed, climbed into her car, and roared off.
Peter, meanwhile, stopped at a roadside pay phone and dialed the Connorses, got Martha. “I’m so glad to see you made it down here all right,” she said, her voice warm. “We had a visitor last night—”
“Oh? Who?”
“I don’t think we should talk about it on the phone. But come on over.”
About two hours later, Peter was sitting in the Connorses’ little kitchen, going over much the same ground with her that Spider-Man had the other night. William was out playing ball with some friends elsewhere in the neighborhood.
Martha apparently welcomed that. “It’s hard enough,” she said softly, “to be, effectively, a single parent. But to be one under these circumstances—an unofficial one—” She shook her head. “You can’t share all the difficulties, all the trouble, with children: it’s not fair to them. It makes them think they’re more of a burden than they are.”
“But he’s not a burden,” Peter said.
“No, not at all. All the time, it’s ‘I’ll take care of you, Mom, I’ll help us.’ That willingness—if work alone were enough to make the difference, I’d be a rich woman off his efforts. As far as he’s concerned, nothing’s good enough for me.” She paused. “Your cup’s empty.”
Peter pushed it toward her; she refilled it. “He has friends down here,” he said. “Do you?”
She raised her eyebrows. “Maybe you’re going to think this sounds snobbish of me, but I don’t seem to have interests anything like most of the people here. Not much in common. A lot of my neighbors seem so… fixated on their family lives, their children. They don’t seem to have much of a life outside it, and to them, to have a son and not have a husband, not have the wage-earner on site.… Some of them are very old-fashioned about it. They think, some of them, that I must have done something wrong, or that he must have.” Martha looked at Peter helplessly. “And of course that’s not the case.”
“Of course not,” Peter said.
“So I let them go their way, and I go mine. They’re civil enough. We meet in the store, or down at the PTA…”
Peter nodded. She spoke very lightly, but the kind of life she was describing must have been appallingly lonely.
The front screen door jerked open with a shriek, and banged shut again. “Hey, Mom,” William’s voice yelled, “whose car is that? Oh! Pete!”
William ran over to Peter, a skateboard in hand. There was a moment’s confusion as they tried to work out whether to shake hands or hug each other, and wound up doing both. “I could say something incredibly banal,” Peter said, “like how you’ve grown.”
William rolled his eyes. “Pete—”
“Well, I’m sorry, but you have! Where did you get a whole extra foot of height?”
“Sent out for it,” William said, and grinned. “Never mind. I’m glad you’re here. Mom, I had an idea.”
Martha looked at him curiously. “What, honey?”
“Wait.” He ran off into the next room. When he came back, he was carrying several yellow manila envelopes. “It’s just a thought,” he said, opening one of them and peering into it, going through the contents. “I thought of it while we were playing basketball, and ran right over, and now they’re all mad at me.” And he laughed with the pleasure of someone who has more important things to do. “But look—”
William took some sheets of paper out of the envelope and showed them to his mother. On the backs of them, Peter could just make out a check-balancing form. Bank statements?
“I know these are private,” William said, “but look. See the code numbers?”
Martha looked at the statement, then looked sideways at William. “Can I show him?” William said.
“It’s not as if our bank statements have thousands of zeroes on them at the moment,” Martha said, wry. “Go ahead.”
William brought the pile of bank statements around to Peter. “Look. Here are ch
ecks—” He pointed. “Some more checks—then some cash machine withdrawals. But we do all our withdrawals here in town.” ATM TRANSACTION FF0138, said the line William pointed at now.
“That’s the machine up on Main Street. Look at this, though—” He pointed at another. ATM TRANSACTION FF0152. And another. ATM TRANSACTION FF0132. And another, ATM TRANSACTION FF0148.
“Those aren’t our machine,” William said to Peter. “Dad still has his card… so he must have done those. I’m not sure where they are, though.”
His mother was going through the envelope now. “Now, I wonder,” she was saying absently. “You open one of these accounts and you get so much junk, but I don’t believe Curt would have thrown anything out. He was always—is always—so methodical about his bookkeeping.” Then her expression changed. “Here!” she said triumphantly, and came up with a little credit-card-size booklet, which she opened and paged through. “Yup… I thought so.” Martha handed William the booklet. “This is First Florida’s list of all the machines in the state. It has the code numbers there, honey.”
“Awright!” He started to page through it, went over to a table for a pen, brought it back and started to work more or less over Peter’s shoulder. “This one—this is Marco. This one—it’s Sunniland, and this one is Ochopee—”
“William,” Peter said, “there’s a career waiting for you in detection.”
Martha looked thoughtful. “That’s about a hundred miles southeast of here,” she said. “That general area.”
“I think if you drew a circle containing all those towns,” Peter said, “it’s a fair bet he would be there. Unless he was purposely using those machines to create a false impression that he was there—”
Martha shook her head. “I don’t think so. Curt isn’t the wily type… he’s too direct, if anything. That may be what caused all this trouble, in the first place.” She smiled, a rueful look that Peter was getting to know better than he liked, the expression of someone coping with her pain. “If he’s using those machines regularly, it’s because they’re pretty nearby. He hates to drive more than he has to.”
